


The Double Edged Sword

by Walutahanga



Category: Wonder Woman (Comics), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Assumptions, Backstory, Broken Families, Cultural Differences, Culture Shock, Exile, F/M, Family, Immortality, Pre-Canon, Ships Passing In the Night, Tragedy, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 11:37:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1346050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walutahanga/pseuds/Walutahanga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most people assume that the Amazons hate men. This is very far from the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Double Edged Sword

**Author's Note:**

> Not set in any particular Wonder Woman continuity, though it could probably be squeezed into most. This started out as an attempt to look at the potential reasons behind the Amazons' no-men rule, beyond "grr, we hate men". Then it somehow evolved into a study of the Amazons as a people and how immortality really, really isn't a blessing.

Diana has a secret. Though it’s not her secret, really. And it’s not a secret exactly. It’s simply something that’s not talked about.

It’s hard sometimes, to hear Themyscira spoken of by Man's World. _Oh, that’s the island where they hate men. They won’t let any men come there. Pretty freaky, huh?_

Diana has to bite her lip sometimes, to keep from acidly correcting the speakers. Insults she can weather – words intended to wound may be discarded – but not the assumptions of well-meaning people who should know better. In the beginning she had tried to correct them, had tried to tell people that Amazons don’t hate men. No one had listened, and so she had stopped trying.

Let them think what they will. It is none of their concern anyhow.

* * *

  

The first Amazons were nothing special. Some of them warriors, some of them ordinary women taking up the sword against a brutal oppressor, some caught in a conflict they couldn’t fathom and simply trying to survive until tomorrow. It was the Gods’ generosity that had given them Themyscira and made them immortal.

(There is a saying, among the Amazons, that a God’s gift is a double-edged sword; dangerous to accept, and fatal to refuse.)

The first hundred years on Themyscira were spent in a kind of shock. A people had gone from the viciousness of war to a peaceful existence in the blink of an eye. Some threw down their swords and took up poetry or farming or architecture. Some honed their skills. A few, bleeding from the heart-wounds of friends and family put to the sword, walked into the ocean. Surprisingly little thought was given to their immortal nature then. When you are immortal, and all around you are the same, and there are no gracefully aging mortals to offset the unnaturalness of it, you can ignore it.

That all changed with Achaia.

He washed up on shore during a storm, sole survivor of a mortal shipwreck. He was a beautiful boy, and the Amazons nursed him back to health. To tell the truth, they would have nursed him to health had he been a white-haired one-eyed leper, his novelty and link to the outside world so fascinating. Whatever came after, Achaia had shaken the Amazons out of their collective slump.

As was perhaps inevitable, he fell in love with an Amazon, and she with him, and the rites were performed for the joining of hands as best as anyone remembered them after a hundred years. Within a year’s time, he and his wife were blessed with a daughter.

But the Gods are cruel, even in their mercy.

For while the Amazon was immortal, Achaia was not, and his mortal blood tainted his daughter. They aged and died within a hundred years, and they died resenting the Amazons who remained ever young. His Amazon wife, grieving her husband and daughter, walked into the ocean.

* * *

  

Achaia was a harsh lesson, and well-learned. After his death, Hippolyta issued a decree that mortal men were not allowed on Themyscira. This way she hoped to curb the tragedy that resulted from liaisons with mortals. And it worked well enough. Although occasionally men would wash ashore by accident or design, they would be sent away, along with any half-breed children they sired. Amazons might weep at the parting, but they had all witnessed the tragedy of Achaia. Mortal must not dwell with immortal, for the fruit of their love is bitter.

Then Zeus came to Themyscira, stealing in like a thief in darkness. In his disguises, he wooed Amazons and found them easy prey, for those that preferred the touch of a man had not seen any man in hundreds of years, and the King of Gods was radiant in his beauty. And once Zeus had done it, others tried it too: Hercules blundering ashore and expecting welcoming arms, Apollo with his smirking assurance of victory, Ares with his touch as sweetly poisonous as any apple.

The children that resulted from these encounters were called the God-Born and carried no drop of mortal blood. They were immortal as both their parents, and there a new trouble began.

For Themyscira's resources are vast, but not infinite. 

The overpopulated, desperate Amazons fractured into a dozen warring factions, despite Hippolyta’s attempts to hold them together. Some Amazons sought to kill all the God-Born sons, blaming their gender for the war. Some God-Born children, male and female alike, sought to slay the first generation of Amazons in the name of succession. Some Amazons sought to kill other Amazons in an attempt to preserve resources for their own children. It was an ugly, brutal slaying of kin, sibling against sibling, mother against child.

Eventually, after much death, Hippolyta rallied those that remained, and even harsher laws were laid. No man, mortal or immortal was welcome on Themyscira. All the God-Born sons, no matter the side they’d chosen, were exiled from the land of their mothers and sisters. Any woman who chose to bear a God-Born daughter from this point forward had until the child reached adulthood to send her away, or cede her own place on Themyscira to her.

It was called the time of weeping, as the funeral pires were lit and Themyscira’s sons left it’s shores, to wander for eternity.

* * *

  

Diana hears rumors now and then of an immortal tribe of woman calling themselves Bana-Mighdall. They are the Amazons who ceded their place on Themyscira to their daughters, or outcasts who committed some terrible crime, or simply those who couldn’t accept living by Themysciran laws and wished to see Man’s World. They are aware of Diana and she of them, but no contact has yet been made. There may come a time when she joins them forever, but she has not decided yet and will not for some time.

Of the exiled sons, Diana has heard no whispers, found no myth or legend that might hint at their fate.

Then oneday the Justice League are fighting Brainiac and a man comes to help. A man they have never seen before, who flies and actually manages to hurt Brainiac with a punch.

As the battle winds down, Diana drifts up into the sky to meet the man. Batman is trying to contact her on the radio, but she ignores it, unable to look away from the man who stares back at her with an equally hungry gaze. He’s wearing modern clothes: faded jeans, a t-shirt with the name of a band she doesn’t recognize, and a mobile phone clipped to his belt. He looks only a little older than her, but there is something ancient in his eyes that hints at a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. She cannot help herself but to reach out and stroke the hair back from his face.

He is as dark-haired and olive-skinned as she, sharp-nosed and noble like an old Roman statue and oh so beautiful. She can see why her mother warned her against the God-Born. He is as appealing as his divine fathers and the blood that runs through his veins is kin to hers. Every instinct is telling her that he is made for her. His Adam to her Eve.

“You are your mother’s son?” She asks in Greek.

“As you are your mother’s daughter,” he replies in kind. They are both smiling, though it feels more like weeping.

Her fingers tangle with his and hold tight. His skin is hot to the touch, and she wonders if he was one of those sired by Apollo. His free hand cups the back of her neck and when he kisses her, it’s light and sweet like sunlight on bare skin. She closes her eyes to savor the ache of the forbidden.

“Farewell sister,” he whispers against her lips. “Tell our mothers we abide yet by Hippolyta’s law.”

“Farewell brother.” She whispers. “Tell our sons we remember them still.”

When she opens her eyes, she can see Superman approaching, frowning. But the God-born son is already gently slipping from her arms and flying away. She watches him until he is a spec on the horizon, and her vision grows so blurry she can’t see him anymore.

“Diana?” Superman says cautiously. “Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Who was he?”

She almost tells Superman, who is looking at her with an odd expression like he’s seen some unexpected facet of her. If anyone could understand the Amazons’ loss, it’s Superman, who lost his whole world before he could even speak. A million mothers and fathers, cousins, sisters and brothers, all gone in the blink of an eye.

But no, she decides. Superman, who always does the right thing, could never understand exiling a beloved son or brother for the greater good.

“Lost to us,” she says instead. “Until such times as the gods relent and take back their gifts.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“You’re not meant to.” She smiles to take the sting out of the words. “It’s an Amazon matter. Don’t concern yourself with it.”

The rest of the League is stealing looks at her when they descend, all of them puzzled and a little shocked. It takes her a moment to realise they're surprised by her kissing a man; a person of the gender she supposedly despises. That infuriates her for a second, but a second later, she lets the rage pass. Let them think what they will. It is none of their business anyway and they are such short-lived creatures. The Amazons’ grief was ancient when their grandparents were young.

She lifts her face to the sun and savours the memory of a warm touch. Perhaps oneday, hundreds or thousands of years into the future, the Gods’ power will fade, and with it their gifts. Then the Amazons will welcome their sons and brothers home again. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I should probably qualify - when Diana refers to him as 'brother' it's symbolic only. They're not really related that way. The Amazons might have picked up some bad habits from the Greek Gods but incest isn't one of them.


End file.
